Common Sense Is Still Here. It Just Can’t Get a Word In.

I keep hearing that common sense is dead. I don’t believe that. Dead things are usually quiet, and common sense is still standing off to the side yelling, “You might not want to do that,” while the rest of us charge ahead because a fellow on the internet said it would probably work. Common sense isn’t dead. It has simply been outnumbered, talked over, ignored, and placed on hold while somebody checks with an app. Somewhere along the line, we stopped trusting the small voice in our head that says a wet floor might be slippery and started waiting for a yellow sign to confirm it.

Spend enough time driving and you’ll see what I mean. A navigation system can tell a person to turn right into a cornfield, and there are folks who will slow down, stare at the screen, and seriously consider it. They can see there is no road. There’s a fence, a ditch, and seventeen acres of soybeans standing between them and wherever they’re going, but the little blue line says turn right, so apparently we have a decision to make. Years ago, a person might have looked through the windshield and thought, “That doesn’t appear to be a road.” Today, we stare at a phone as though it has access to information our own eyeballs are somehow missing.

I use navigation too. I’m not standing here with a folded paper map, a compass, and Lewis and Clark tied up in the back seat. Technology is useful. It has gotten me through cities I didn’t know and around road construction that appeared overnight because somebody in charge apparently noticed there was still one usable lane left. But I also understand the phone is offering a suggestion. It is not Moses holding stone tablets. If it tells me to drive into the Mississippi River, I’m going to decline the route and accept the three-minute delay.

That seems like common sense, but common sense has become a suspicious character. We’ve replaced it with procedures, instructions, warnings, tutorials, and people online explaining how to do things that human beings managed for centuries without a subscription. There’s probably a twelve-minute video somewhere showing how to sit in a chair safely. It will begin with an introduction, two advertisements, and a reminder to click the little bell so you don’t miss next week’s lesson on opening a door. By the time the fellow gets to the actual chair, most of us could have built one.

The strange part is that we have access to more information than any generation in history, yet plenty of us seem less willing to think. We can look up the capital of Lithuania while standing in the cereal aisle, but we need three Facebook groups and a forty-seven-minute podcast to decide whether milk that smells like roadkill has gone bad. We’ve confused having information with having judgment. Those are not the same thing. Information can tell you the temperature outside. Judgment tells you whether you need a coat. Wisdom tells you that you’ll probably leave the coat in the restaurant anyway, so maybe wear the old one.

I don’t blame younger people for all of this either. That would be easy, and older generations have already turned blaming younger people into an Olympic event. Every generation believes it invented hard work and the people coming behind them invented laziness. I’m sure some Roman fellow stood beside a newly paved road complaining that kids had gotten soft because they no longer had to walk through mud. We didn’t lose common sense because children started carrying phones. Plenty of adults own phones too, and some of us have used them to make decisions that would embarrass a child with a box of crayons.

The real problem may be that we’ve made it too easy to avoid responsibility for our own thinking. If the GPS sends us the wrong way, it’s the GPS’s fault. If something ridiculous appears online, it’s the algorithm. If we buy something that was obviously too good to be true, we blame the advertisement. Nobody wants to say, “I saw a battery-powered nose trimmer for ninety-seven cents from a company named Best American Quality Products Limited, entered my credit card information, and perhaps exercised poor judgment.” No, we were scammed. Apparently the deal looked legitimate right up until the confirmation email arrived in an alphabet we couldn’t identify.

Common sense used to live in the pause between an idea and an action. That small moment when a person considered what could go wrong. We seem to have removed the pause. Now the idea arrives, the thumb moves, and thirty seconds later we’ve purchased something, posted something, forwarded something, or told a stranger exactly what we think of him. Then we spend the next afternoon trying to undo it. The internet gave everybody a voice, which sounded wonderful until we discovered some people had been quiet for a very good reason.

Social media may be the finest example. Somebody posts a photograph with a sentence written across it, and half the country accepts it as sworn testimony. No source. No date. No explanation. Just a blurry picture and words in capital letters, which apparently makes it official. Then somebody shares it with the warning, “They don’t want you to know this.” I’m never quite sure who “they” are, but they must be exhausted. They’re hiding medical cures, changing weather reports, controlling grocery prices, altering football games, and somehow still finding time to remove people’s favorite television shows.

The sentence “Do your own research” gets used a lot now. That sounds reasonable until you realize somebody’s research consisted of watching three videos made by people who already agreed with them. That isn’t research. That’s shopping. You walked into the store knowing what answer you wanted and kept browsing until you found it in your size. Real research occasionally ruins your afternoon by proving you were wrong. Most people don’t enjoy that part, so we’ve developed a faster method. We call the information we like “truth” and everything else “propaganda,” then congratulate ourselves for remaining open-minded.

Common sense does not require a college degree. Some of the smartest people I have known could rebuild an engine, raise a family, stretch a paycheck, predict bad weather by looking west, and tell within five minutes whether a person was full of nonsense. They may not have used words like “critical thinking,” but they practiced it every day. They asked simple questions. Does this make sense? Who benefits from me believing it? Is the person telling me this trying to sell me something? Has this fellow ever been right before? Those questions will protect you from a surprising amount of foolishness, including some that arrives wearing a nice suit.

Common sense also requires knowing when you don’t know. That one has become unpopular. Apparently every person must now have an immediate opinion about every subject on earth. A bridge collapses somewhere, and within twelve minutes people who couldn’t identify a load-bearing wall are explaining structural engineering. A court issues a ruling nobody has read, and suddenly every cousin at the family reunion is a constitutional scholar. A football coach makes a fourth-down decision, and millions of people who become winded carrying groceries know exactly what he should have done.

There is nothing wrong with saying, “I don’t know enough about that yet.” Those may be the six smartest words left in the English language. They won’t get many likes, but they’ll keep you from spending Thursday defending something you said on Tuesday before the facts arrived Wednesday. I’ve had opinions I later learned were wrong. I would like to say that happened only when I was young, but apparently age does not automatically install wisdom. Sometimes it only gives foolishness reading glasses.

Common sense isn’t always exciting. Usually it’s the boring choice. Save some money. Don’t send that message angry. Read the whole article. Check the source. Wear the seat belt. Don’t loan your truck to the cousin who returned your lawn mower with one wheel missing and no explanation. Common sense rarely enters the room with fireworks. It usually clears its throat and suggests we sleep on it. That’s probably why we ignore it. Foolishness has better advertising.

We also tend to recognize common sense most clearly right after we needed it. Once the ladder has fallen, the text has been sent, the money is gone, or the lawn mower comes back missing another wheel, everything becomes obvious. That’s when somebody says, “Well, I knew that was going to happen.” Of course they did. There are no wiser people on earth than those standing safely beside somebody else’s mistake. They can explain every warning sign after the ambulance leaves.

I don’t think the answer is returning to some imaginary time when everybody was sensible. That time never existed. People have always made bad decisions. The Bible opens with two people living in paradise with one rule, and they still managed to turn it into a meeting with management. Human history has been moving along those same rails ever since. We have better tools now, but we’re still the same creatures operating them. A smartphone can give a foolish idea global distribution before breakfast, but it didn’t invent the foolish idea.

Maybe all common sense needs is a little room to speak. A pause before we share the story. A glance through the windshield before following the blue line. A night’s sleep before sending the message. One honest question before believing the claim. We don’t have to become suspicious of everything. That’s not wisdom either. We just need to stop treating every confident person as an expert and every piece of information as truth simply because it arrived on a screen.

Common sense is still here. It’s sitting quietly in the passenger seat, watching us follow the GPS toward the cornfield. It doesn’t yell much anymore because it’s tired of arguing. But every once in a while, just before the pavement ends, it leans over and says, “You know, we don’t actually have to do this.”

It might be worth listening before we reach the beans.

-Mark